Smashing Security

Sep 16, 20261h 2m#485

Researchers wanted to test if LG's smart TVs come with any security risks - but their lawyers noticed a snag: the terms and conditions would forbid it. So they came up with a solution. They got plastered before setting u

Sep 9, 202645m#484

When a chap called Matt noticed his Bluetooth headphones wouldn't switch to his phone, he was surprised to realise the reason was a single AliExpress webpage sitting open in his browser - playing nothing at all, at zero

Sep 2, 202644m#483

You've had your iPhone stolen. A day later, you get a text from Apple saying they've found it, and a very helpful woman called Alice from Apple Support calls to walk you through recovering it. She's polite. She's profess

Aug 26, 202650m#482

A hacker calling themselves "CYBERLEEK" has been leaking gameplay footage from GTA 6 ahead of its official reveal this week - but they're not asking Rockstar Games for a ransom. Instead, they've launched their own crypto

Aug 19, 202645m#481

At Black Hat this month, a group of security researchers took a $9,000 robot dog, plugged Google's AI into its brain, and jailbroke it by telling it - with a completely straight face - that it was a Pokemon. What followe

Aug 12, 202645m#480

Would you like access to Anthropic's Claude at 90% off the normal price? All you have to do is redirect your traffic to a mysterious service called "Poison Claude". Only problem is that it's run by fraudsters... Meanwhil

Aug 5, 202659m#479

Graham gets a phone call from the police. Well, someone who sounds convincingly like the police. There's just one small problem: what they really want is the 24-word seed key to Graham's cryptocurrency wallet. Meanwhile,

Jul 29, 202658m#478

You've been headhunted for a great job in cryptocurrency. All you have to do is complete a short online assessment - with your webcam on, of course, so they can verify who you really are. Which is ironic, because the per

Jul 22, 202650m#477

A Russian intelligence-linked hacker is arrested in Thailand while enjoying a beach holiday - and the trail of evidence that nailed him to the Russian government includes 14 separate orders of chicken McNuggets. Meanwhil

Jul 15, 202638m#476

An app has appeared in India that lets anyone with a smartphone stop a passing e-rickshaw dead in its tracks - no login, no passwords, no permissions needed. Meanwhile, Geoff - swimming in money and Lamborghinis, as all

Jul 8, 202646m#475

A 15-year-old boy asked a chatbot for help - and cancelled nearly 47,000 anime streaming subscriptions in under four hours. Meanwhile, researchers have documented the first fully autonomous, agentic AI-driven ransomware

Jul 1, 202642m#474

Polymarket has built an entire business on predicting the future. So how did it manage to spectacularly fail to predict its own hack? Plus, the Google engineer with a million-dollar secret, and the curious case of the ai

Jun 24, 20261h 0m#473

A polite caller from your bank says there is a problem with your account. Don't worry - they'll send someone round to help. They'll even take your cards away to keep them safe. The scam has run rampant, until Dutch polic

Jun 17, 20261h 12m#472

What if your AI coding assistant could be tricked into stealing your own company's secrets - by reading a single booby-trapped bug report? No phishing email. No malware. No password ever stolen. Just an AI doing exactly

Jun 10, 202646m#471

Researchers at the University of Toronto have built a worm that thinks for itself. Using free off-the-shelf AI models it works out how to break into each new computer it encounters, and hijacks the powerful ones to host

Jun 3, 202657m#470

A website called "UK visa portal" has been quietly collecting passport scans, selfies, and personal data from thousands of travellers who thought they were applying through official channels. They weren't. And when a jou

May 27, 202653m#469

CISA, the US government agency whose entire job is keeping America's critical infrastructure safe from hackers, has had a contractor publish dozens of plain-text credentials to a public GitHub profile. Meanwhile, your Ou

May 20, 202655m#468

A 23-year-old radio enthusiast spent £300 on a piece of kit from the internet, and used it to bring four packed high-speed trains to a screeching halt. His defence in court? Possibly the most creative excuse we've heard

May 13, 20261h 4m#467

Welcome to the largest educational data breach in history - affecting nearly 9,000 institutions, every Ivy League university, and 30 million students mid-finals. When Canvas's parent company refused to pay and announced

May 6, 20261h 2m#466

Meta's smart glasses promise privacy "designed for you" - but everything they record was being beamed off to workers in Nairobi to label by hand. When those workers blew the whistle, Meta sacked all 1,108 of them. Meanwh

Apr 29, 20261h 4m#465

A developer at an AI startup wanted to cheat at Roblox. They downloaded a dodgy script on their work laptop. That one decision triggered a cascade of failures that ended with a $2 million data breach affecting hundreds o

Apr 22, 202651m#464

A company that ran anonymous tip lines for 35,000 American schools - handling reports of bullying, weapons, and self-harm - boasted on its website that it had suffered zero security breaches in over 20 years. A hacker ca

Apr 15, 202650m#463

A hacking group claims to have broken into the flood defence system protecting Venice's Piazza San Marco - and is offering to sell access to whoever wants it. The asking price? A frankly insulting $600. Meanwhile, Anthro

Apr 8, 202641m#462

LinkedIn has been secretly scanning your browser for over 6,000 installed extensions — on every single click you make. It can tell if you're job hunting, what religion you are, and whether you have ADHD. And none of this

Apr 1, 202645m#461

A cannabis-growing, beekeeping, gyrocopter-flying Irishman invested his drug money in Bitcoin back in 2011 - and now sits on a fortune worth $400 million. There's just one small problem: the access codes were tucked insi